✖ Online ‘sextortion’ of teens on the rise

The nightmare began with a party: three teenage girls with a webcam, visiting an Internet chatroom and yielding to requests to flash their breasts. A week later, one of the girls, a 17-year-old from Indiana, started getting threatening e-mails. A stranger said he had captured her image on the webcam and would post the pictures to her MySpace friends unless she posed for more explicit pictures and videos for him. On at least two occasions, the teen did what her blackmailer demanded. Finally, police and federal authorities became involved and indicted a 19-year-old Maryland man in June on charges of sexual exploitation.

One of Germany’s biggest pop stars has admitted she’s no angel. Nadja Benaissa, of the best-selling girl group No Angels, told a German court on Monday that she knowingly exposed multiple men to the HIV virus without telling them she was a carrier. Benaissa, 28, is on trial this week, accused of “grievous bodily harm and attempted aggravated assault,”

✖ Raw food: Raid on raw-food grocery store highlights a hunger

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid’s target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

More than a dozen of the church’s worst sex abuse scandals of the past 30 years.

“Seeing a cop down was hysterical to them. They thought it was the funniest thing they ever saw,” said Trooper Cliff Pratt, State Patrol spokesman. “They didn’t know whether he was going to live or die and they didn’t care. That’s what makes it so hard to swallow.”

Tequila continued to perform even after her face started bleeding, he said. “She was holding a towel to her head, blood pouring down her face,” he said.

Have this generation’s crop of hippy-dippy indie artists found a new drug to match their music? Devendra Banhart, the Bees and Klaxons have in recent weeks namechecked ayahuasca, a so-called “plant medicine” taken in the Peruvian rainforest over intense 10-day periods. Klaxons’ Jamie Reynolds even went so far as to cite the experience as a key factor in helping his band finally follow up their debut album. But before you rush out to guzzle down this herbal brew, it’s perhaps best to know what you’re letting yourself in for.

You can infuse flavors into liquor (and water based things, too) almost instantly with nothing more than an ISI whipped cream maker. You can use seeds, herbs, spiced, fruits, cocoa nibs, etc.

✖ When Your Kid Smokes Pot

O.K., so you found some weed in your teen-agers room. Depending on the kind of parent you are, your reaction to that can range from mild amusement to thermonuclear. But assuming you are not going to smoke the stuff yourself, you are confronted with making some decisions on what to do about it. Perhaps you think it is time to call a counselor, or maybe even the thought of a treatment center for young people with drug problems crosses your mind. As someone who worked in the chemical dependency treatment field for two decades, and who wrote and directed several treatment programs, let me make a suggestion about that. Don’t. Don’t even think about it.